9to5mac is reporting that their sources are telling them that the Apple datacenter project is being built on an unprecedented scale, with construction to start sometime in the first quarter of 2013. Given that Google’s first step was the purchase of seven acres of land for their Hong Kong datacenter facility, the scale of the Apple operation, if accurately represented, would be an amazingly large facility.

This could simply mean that Apple is planning on consolidating Asian operations in a single huge datacenter at one of the communication hubs for the continent. Google, for example, is also building a large datacenter facility in Taiwan, to also service their Asian customers, along with the facility in Hong Hong.

Apple’s plans for this datacenter make perfect sense as they move in to the largest and fastest growing market in the world for datacenter services and mobile communications. In 2011 Apple reported a 6x growth in their revenue from China over the previous year’s revenue.